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Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Animal rights extremists have won a strange victory from a court that seems to be one saddle shy of a posse. An orangutan was ruled a "non-human person". Definitions are important, especially over concepts (such as evolution) that have multiple meanings. But person? (Ironically, the word "orangutan" comes from the Malay language, and roughly translates as "person of the forest"). How can an ape be rationally defined as a person at all? This nonsense is an extension of environmental extremism.

morgueFile / bekkli

Extreme environmentalism and giving rights to animals (sometimes trying to give them more rights than humans have, especially unborn humans!) is based on a faulty view of origins from evolutionary thinking. Biblical creationists know that people are unique, created in God's image. Darwinistas need to believe we're all essentially the same because we all evolved from a common ancestor and humans got the luck of the draw. I reckon that anybody with a grain of sense can see that humans are unique.

An Argentine court made history when it granted an orangutan, ‘Sandra’, some legal rights that have traditionally been reserved for humans. The BBC reports:

Lawyers for Argentina’s Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights (Afada) said Sandra was “a person” in the philosophical, not biological, sense.
She was, they argued, in a situation of illegal deprivation of freedom as a “non-human person”.

The BBC did not include a comment from Sandra expressing her thoughts about her newfound rights.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

The goo-to-you Darwinists are once again misusing the word "evolution". They claim that because humans are changing the environment of mosquitoes with insecticides, the wretched critters are evolving resistance and becoming super suckers. This is selection, speciation, and variation, not evidence of molecules-to-man evolution.Is there new genetic information? In a way, yes, since hybridization (interbreeding) leads to adaptive introgression, where genetic information is transferred. Nothing to see here, folks, except observational science misusing that word (I don't think it means what they think it means). For that matter, it is suspected that malaria itself is a devolved relative of algae.

The war on malaria has made great strides by draping insecticide-treated netting over beds in endemic areas. Deaths worldwide have decreased by 47% since the year 2000, largely due to this innovative approach to keeping mosquito vectors away from people at risk. But a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows this seemingly innocuous measure may have triggered the development of a new “super” insecticide-resistant mosquito that will not long be deterred by the nets.“It’s ‘super’ with respect to its ability to survive exposure to the insecticides on treated bed nets, “ explains medical entomologist Gregory Lanzaro of UC Davis. He says his team’s work “provides convincing evidence indicating that a man-made change in the environment—the introduction of insecticides—has altered the evolutionary relationship between two species, in this case a breakdown in the reproductive isolation that separates them.”

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

For Question Evolution Day 2015, I decided to address a fallacy that I've seen in anti-creationists. Some have observed that there is disagreement among creation scientists regarding the interpretation of observed data, and that viewpoints have been modified. Do they need to be in lockstep, marching together about everything all the time?

Some atheist and evolutionist "logic" seems to go like this: "Creationists disagree. Therefore, creation science is false. Therefore, the Bible is not true. Therefore, there is no God!" Really, I've seen some sidewinders make amazing leaps in bad reasoning like that.Let's take a gander at their evolutionary counterparts. Those scientists are constantly changing their views, rearranging evolutionary timelines, re-examining viewpoints, getting embarrassed when their "facts" are challenged, and more. True science changes to fit the facts, with faulty theories getting changed or even rejected. Fungi-to-farmer evolutionists will keep their worldviews despite the evidence, even trying to force-fit the data to fit their conjectures. Although Darwinoids will present their "science" as if the scientists were in agreement, there are secular scientists that doubt Darwin, reject the Big Bang, disagree that dinosaurs evolved into birds, and more.Creation scientists also have their worldviews, and interpret the data accordingly, just like their secular counterparts. Biblical creationist scientists agree on the validity of Scripture, and will change their models when the need arises. (Unlike many secular scientists, they do not need to fudge the data, pass bad peer reviewed papers, and even resort to fraud to bolster their worldview.) Creationist scientists are not in lockstep, propping up bad theories and models despite the evidence. There are about four significant models dealing with distant starlight and creation, and differing models regarding plate tectonics and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, and more. That's what makes science grow. Protecting failed models like those in evolution is an anti-science mindset.

Creation science ministries as well as individuals disagree with each other on some details. For that matter, I've disagreed with material presented from some major creationist organizations on some aspects of science and theology; thinking people do that.So, no, creationists don't have to be in lockstep. Scientists as well as us regular folks freely disagree on some points, but uphold the important part: God's written Word is our foundation, and is true from the very first verse.

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Some people claim that a validation of evolution as a science is its predictive power. To back up this claim, they rustle up some vague generalities, other things that can be explained by other means, conflation of "evolution" with "natural selection", and a few actual predictions that worked a little.Evolution is touted as an irresistible, inexorable law of nature — organisms will evolve. Not hardly. Things that don't get huge coverage in the sensationalist science press are the dead ends and things that refute evolution. Living fossils are a real nuisance for them, but they have their double speak handy, often claiming that something didn't evolve because it didn't need to. Yeah, that makes sense. Any excuse in a storm, right?Here's something that is in strata that doesn't normally contain fossils, can't be fully classified, but has a very strong resemblance to something that is living today.

A strange, new, mushroom-shaped species discovered alive on the deep seafloor near Australia—more than 3,000 feet below sea level—may be a record-breaking living fossil. Researchers investigated the anatomy of this phenomenal animal and published their finds in the online journal PLoS ONE. The creature has a pharynx running down the center of a central stalk, leading to "gastrovascular branches" that look like leaf veins running through a soft disc-like body part. It's not a jellyfish, sea squirt, or sponge.Because it doesn't fit current categories of biology, the search is now on to find out what this creature is, and if or how it might relate to other animals—such as its basic phylum. Every phylum includes a very broad group of creatures. For example, phylum Cnidaria includes all forms of jellyfish, but excludes all other creatures. But so far, this new mushroom-shaped species "cannot at present be placed in an existing phylum." It does, however, have a genus: Dendrogramma.

Question Evolution Day

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour